Amerika

What is it that causes us to mythologize small town America? Some of it is the familiarity, and the tolerance for eccentricity that comes with it. But even more, it may be that we like that way of life better, and that includes its economy.

In rural America, most people are proprietors. They own farms, stores, or work in professions. This enables them to work from home or closer to home, to be fundamentally non-consumerist, to avoid having their brains captured by the mental viruses repeated by people in casual chatter, and to own and control the means of their futures.

Yet that way of life is dying out. A recent article on Trump supporters in a small Texas town where farming and ranching are still king discussing the consequences of the estate tax for their families:

The Lockes are part of a select group of people affected by the estate tax. In 2013, 0.18 percent of people who died that year were eligible to pay estate taxes, according to data released by the Tax Policy Center in 2017.

…Breeding discussed how “a lot of people don’t really have a lot of wealth, as like dollar bills in their pocket,” in rural parts of the country like Roberts County. But “they have a lot of wealth built up in land, that they’ve inherited,” he said.

…While talking to ABC News in October 2017, Locke posed a hypothetical: He imagined that if Clinton had won, his family “would have had to sell our land to the point where it wasn’t sustainable for two families,” losing what they had worked for generations to accumulate.

Farmers and small business owners find themselves in the same boat: the value of their businesses far exceed their own wealth. In relatively thin-margin activities, it is entirely possible to have a business worth millions — land, equipment, sales — and to personally draw a relatively modest salary (which is also taxed, one might add).

The Left in both America and Europe has pursued a policy of removing familial wealth of this nature because such wealth conflicts with the appearance of egalitarianism. For us to really be equal, everyone must start out with the same “blank slate” of character and life. Then, they can prove their worth to society by “working hard” and being rewarded.

This ignores the hereditary nature of abilities. Someone who was an excellent farmer will, barring the few exceptions for bad breeding or deleterious mutations, produce offspring who also have the ability to be excellent farmers. Those who grow up in a family business have not just the skills but the familiarity required to continue doing what made it succeed.

The Left is comprised of people who fear reality. They see it as uneven, organic, jagged, and ambiguous; as a result, they want to impose a rigid and boxy order upon it through the idea of “equality” or “leveling” in which every person is made into an approximately similar unit and controlled through incentives and punishments. This is the managerial nature of a society at war with itself.

As a result, the Left wants to tear down those family business, not just for the taxes, but to force everyone into the easily conceptualized modern lifestyle: every person has a job and apartment or house, pays taxes, and waits in line for exactly the same things. The essence of Communism and Consumerism is this same desire to smooth everything out and make it an Excel spreadsheet.

For this reason, their estate taxes accomplish a simple goal: to displace everyone from the land and independent business, to force everyone to be an employee living in the cities, and then, to control them with the same salaries and fears of public image that are used to keep most people mute, obedient, and conformist.

If anything, the neurosis in the heart of human individuals fears that someone else is living a life that is not controlled and miserable. The people who feel that they have no options are enraged that someone somewhere is living a non-miserable life, and they intend to crush it, with the estate tax as only one of their many methods.

Tags: conformity, estate tax, misery loves company, neurosis